While most of the wireless world still has its eyes glued to 5G, something else is happening that will arguably impact our connected lives sooner than 5G and more forcefully: Next generation Wi-Fi. Qualcomm’s Wi-Fi 6 product launch this week means the world is one big step closer to what everyone undeniably wants: Better, faster, more fully-featured Wi-Fi everywhere.

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In San Francisco this Tuesday, Qualcomm announced a new and expanded family of Wi-Fi 6 networking (router or AP) chips dubbed ‘Pro Series’ as well as a new ‘FastConnect 6800’ client-side solution (a subsystem on the 855 Snapdragon platform). Qualcomm’s two new platforms set a high bar for what we can expect from live Wi-Fi 6 performance in the near future.

Four new Wi-Fi 6 networking chips, four times the performance

The ‘Pro Series’ chipset family comes in four flavours delivering from four to twelve spatial streams. The new chipset family allows consumer and enterprise-grade AP vendors such as Cisco, Aruba/HPE, CommScope, NETGEAR – all speaking at the launch event this week – to create Wi-Fi 6 networking products at a range of price points and performance levels.

And Qualcomm is making some big promises on what performance boost to expect from Wi-Fi 6: The ‘Pro Series’ will deliver up to four times better throughput per end-user device compared to Wi-Fi 5 “even at extended range and in the most congested of networks,” the company said, citing a peak speed (for the 12-stream device) of 6 Gbps. The new chips also support up to a whopping 1500 simultaneous users per access point and 37 OFDMA users per 5 MHz channel.

Features beyond Wi-Fi 6’s first release

The client-side platform even brandishes a feature beyond the current first release of the Wi-Fi 6 standard: Uplink MU-MIMO. It also includes ‘8×8 sounding’ allowing mobile phones and laptops to broadcast their 8×8 MU-MIMO capability to APs, hence extracting maximum performance from MU-MIMO-equipped access points and routers.

Another useful client-side feature is ‘Target Wake Time’ (TWT) that should reduce battery consumption on your phone. Qualcomm says the new ‘FastConnect 6800’ Wi-Fi 6 platform will deliver up to 1.8 Gbps of data to your phone or laptop using the new 1024 QAM modulation scheme.

A ‘toolbox of features’ for myriads of new use cases

While OFDMA has often been cited as the most important Wi-Fi 6 feature, Qualcomm was careful to point out that 8×8 MU-MIMO (including its uplink variety) is as important if not more so when it comes to Wi-Fi 6 performance. Qualcomm said it has already shipped 750 million MU-MIMO-capable client devices and a staggering 4 billion Wi-Fi devices in total since 2015.

So whether your preference is MU-MIMO, OFDMA, 1024 QAM or all three or something different: It was abundantly clear at Qualcomm’s launch event that Wi-Fi 6 is not just one or two new functions but instead a wide-ranging ‘toolbox of features’ that can and will be applied to a long list of new use cases from industrial IoT to interactive smart spaces to gaming to – well, you name it.

CommScope: The time is right to upgrade

If you’re still thinking it is too soon to upgrade your network to Wi-Fi 6 consider this: CommScope demonstrated at the event that Ruckus Wi-Fi 6 APs with 8×8 MIMO boosts legacy Wi-Fi performance by 30% or more when compared to Wi-Fi 5 APs. And with new Wi-Fi 6 infrastructure you can be pretty sure that you’ve taken care of your wireless networking needs for the next five years.